“Spitting in the Wind: Art From the End of the Line by Richard Allen Morris, John Baldessari, Bob Matheny, and Russell Baldwin”

Anybody with an interest in contemporary art knows about John Baldessari, and anybody with an interest in Baldessari knows about his “Cremation Project.” In 1970, Baldessari cremated much of his earlier work. Later that year, he moved from San Diego to the Los Angeles area, where he went on to become a reluctant superstar in the international art world.

Baldessari had a UC San Diego student, David Wing, film the disposal process, which included the artist reducing 123 paintings down to “bite-sized chunks” and then cremating them at the Cypress View Mausoleum and Crematory. The seldom-seen, important 10-minute film was recently digitized, but you can’t see it in New York or Los Angeles. It is now showing in Oceanside.

It’s on a continual loop in an illuminating exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art, “Spitting in the Wind: Art From the End of the Line by Richard Allen Morris, John Baldessari, Bob Matheny, and Russell Baldwin.”

San Diego’s art history is typically told through the lens of UC San Diego, where Baldessari was briefly on the faculty and where the local art community’s most visible names, from Allan Kaprow to Eleanor Antin, had faculty positions. There is also an occasional mention of SDSU, where the international regard of artists like Arline Fisch and Wendy Maruyama could not be ignored.

But “Spitting in the Wind” curator David Hampton is committed to revealing an alternative history that predated UCSD. It was largely centered at the community colleges (particularly Southwestern College and Palomar College) and the La Jolla Art Center (now MCASD), where Morris, Baldessari, Matheny and Baldwin formed friendships, taught and exhibited.

“Here are some artists who are pillars of contemporary art in San Diego, and during their heyday, if you want to call it that, when they were starting these unique community college programs, they were more recognized, more appreciated,” said Hampton. “In the ’80s and the ’90s, as they aged, and as they retired, with the exception of Richard (Allen Morris, who has been getting some recent attention), you feel like the appreciation of their roles in this community has also waned.”

History is one thing; art is another. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this essential exhibition is the consistent quality of the art and a shared interest in similar mediums, starting from abstract painting to assemblage to sculpture and the use of text. But there are even commonalities of ideas; if Baldessari’s response to “the world has too much art — I have made too many objects — what to do?” (his words) was to burn it, Matheny a year earlier started the “Art Disposal Service” to address the same problem.

Indeed, if you took the labels off the walls, and just saw the exhibition cold, it would be challenging to immediately discern which art was by a world famous artist who left for Los Angeles and which art was by relatively unknown artists who stayed home.

“It backs up this idea of the title,” said Hampton.

Here’s the show’s title in context, from a 1994 interview with Baldessari: “In retrospect, Southwestern College was very important, even though a lot we did was just spitting into the wind.”